New Yankee Stadium- growing on me, maintained excellent visual continuity one stadium to the other, so it feels like you never left, which I don't know if its good or bad but it eased the transition. Food is pretty good, more chain and less bold than Citi field, but a Pittsburgh level sightlines experience. Fix monument park and this might go to the top 4. The Retro Facade presentation is REALLY growing on me nicely, it affords some spectacular visuals in the TV and photo coverage.
Citi Field - TREMENDOUS food, but not really interesting game play. Need to spend more time here to judge, maybe out of the bridge or in the pepsi porch thing. Another big improvement over the prior one. Don't care for the black walls in on the playing field, maybe a cheesey aestethic gripe.
No idea how you put Citi below New Yankee Stadium. The upper deck seats are right ontop of the action at Citi, you already mentioned the amazing food. Plus, there isnt a moat. Seats in the lower bowl are too expensive, but there much better than the Yankees. They added some nice Mets specific accents to the park. The only real negative is the bizarre Robinson Rotunda. Meanwhile, New Yankee Stadium is big and clean and corporate. It feels more like a football stadium than a ballpark, and thats not a good thing.
The new stadium remains true to the aesthetic of the old, and the old was NOT Wrigley or Fenway. It was big, and grand and intimidating. If I could gripe here, one of my problems was going below a 50,000 capacity.
I have a friend who had upper deck season tix at Citi and he gave them up because of the views. His mind was that he was so on top of the action, he couldn't see it. Second hand info, as I said, I need to go through it more to be fair.
Yankee Stadium, between the lines, has maintained and even probably slightly increased the advantage to the left handed hitter. Its a tough shot to get it out to center there(for whatever wind reasons) and LF is still LF. Citi, between the bases, is just not fun baseball to me. It reminds me of Comerica before they moved the fences in, or that year in Cleveland when Alex Cole had a few good months and they reconfigured the park. The park, to my eye, doesn't play fair with power. You want high walls and deep alleys and you want a little Polo/Ebbets feel, fine, but they also had very reasonable shots if you pulled it down the line. It put the onus on the pitcher to keep it in the middle of the ball park and created hitters that had certain tendencies. Sort of like Fenway plays now, RF eats up mistakes while LF allows homers on good pitches. Challenging and interesting. Citi is just a poke any way you want to get it out of there and after a while its not fun.
An intriguing thing to watch is going to be the spaces on the first concourse, because last year and right now, they allow standing room fans to conglomerate there. I think many new parks and Citi does too, but maybe the Mets lack of success hasn't lead to that energy reaching interesting levels yet, but it can get pretty loud and intense for Yankee games. I'm sure the suits in the seats are complaining and that would be a shame if they moved people away from that. I had a big beef that they so neutralized the Bleacher Creatures by putting them behind a section but the noise there was making some inroads to restoring the intimidation. I don't know how well that translated to the field but being there, there was juice.
), tourists, and band wagon fans. But it's still a great place to catch a game. The same food service now runs both venues.
